Monday, March 11, 2013

Reconciling PvP and PvE

Unrelated to this post, but Power Word: Dinosaur is the greatest spell introduced into WoW.
At least for me, Blizzard's expansion of Valor has worked out pretty well. Last week I capped out on Valor by doing:

2 Isle of the Thunder King rares

4 Raid Finder wings

2 Scenarios

1 5-man dungeon

5 days worth of Isle of the Thunder King dailies

5 days worth of the farm rep quests

Notice that I never did the maximum in any activity, but rather did some of pretty much everything. Meanwhile, in The Old Republic, I pretty much only log in to raid recently.

I think that spreading Valor around has worked out pretty well. However, I was wondering about PvP.

You know, back in Vanilla and TBC, I used to PvP casually. I got my Knight-Captain rank and [The Unstoppable Force], like everyone else. But then I just stopped. And to be honest, I'm not really sure why. I think it's mainly looking at the path in front of me, and realizing it's easier to just stay on the PvE path rather than attempt to do both.

I know there's a lot of people who are very vocal about needing PvP to be completely divorced from PvE. Not sharing gear, not sharing reward systems. And that is the path that WoW and pretty much every major themepark game has taken.

But I wonder if this was the best path? Would it have been better if the two systems used the same type of gear, offered the same rewards? It would make it a lot easier for people to drop in and out. To do a battleground or two here and there. Maybe it would have led to more intermixing between the PvP and PvE communities.

The big issue back in the day was that it was too easy to earn gear in PvP compared to PvE, especially with bosses like Kael'thas and Lady Vashj. But the modern PvE has Raid Finder, and normal modes, and it is expected that everyone moves into the latest tier pretty soon after it is released. The pace of gear more closes matches that of PvP now.

Of course, the edge PvP/PvE people will complain, saying that maybe a certain piece from the other side is BiS for their purposes. But you know what, screw the edge players. If you want to be hardcore, you do what it takes to be hardcore. I think the large middle section of WoW would benefit from the reconciliation of PvE and PvP, as it would be far easier to dip in and out of each segment.

4 comments:

Nicely said, WoW is for everybody not just the chosen few. This game should be doing different things, not doing the same activity every single night. The Twinks have always done everything possible to get the BiS so why can't PvPers do a Raid to get a BiS.

The big advantage of this, is not having to carry two complete sets of gear around.

I don't think they can bring PVP and PVE together without adding a 3rd spec. PVE support toons (tanks and healers) require that their 2nd spec be a DPS to do dailies or for the occasional fight where they are needed to DPS (especially the swing healer most 10 mans use).

They would need a 3rd spec for PVP (as well as really hurting for bag space - more Void storage please!)

I think giving everyone 40% base resilience is an effort in this direction, along with having pvp power & resil not count towards item level.

The former lets you get by moderately well in PVP using PVE gear, at least to start, especially if you have high quality PVE gear. And I believe the better PVE weapons are BiS or close for PVP next season, perhaps indicating they have gone too far already in that direction. Without much additional resilience on your gear, you'll of course get blown up in arenas or RBGs, but you can do surprisingly well in casual PVP with PVE gear.

The second factor of pvp power & resil not counting towards item level makes it so PVP gear can be fairly easy to get, and do moderately well in PVE, without distorting things by letting people boost their item level excessively to get into LFR and such. A plate tank in full PVP gear is still going to do poorly, but no worse than they'd do in DPS PVE gear.

I think that's a pretty good place to be in terms of relative power of the two gearsets. You can use the non-ideal set to get started in a second activity, but you'll still do better if you put more effort to get the appropriate gear.

PVP gear is obtained via a currency-buy system, whereas PVE gear is obtained (primarily) via a random-drops system. That is the major thing keeping them apart at the moment. Blizzard knows that given the opportunity, players would take a currency grind over a random drop chance, so they have to keep the gear separate to prevent PVP from becoming the obvious path to gear.

Blizzard could give up on random drops and convert PVE wholly to a currency-buy system, but that would be a fairly big design change. If it were done, then both systems could use the same gear on the same vendors with the same currency.